A seven-year project funded by Germany and the World Bank to give secure and fertile land to some of the country’s poorest families has so far mostly failed to deliver on its goals and left most of the families no better off, according to a new study.

The study by rights group Licadho, “On Stony Ground: A look into social land concessions,” contradicts the World Bank’s own glowing review of its work.

Licadho urges against using the project as a model for a planned second phase, which, if approved, would effectively lift a freeze on new lending to Cambodia the Bank imposed four years ago, precisely because of the government’s poor record on land rights.

“While additional support is needed to meet the promises of reduced poverty and increased food security for many of the families supported by LASED [Land Allocation for Social and Economic Development], the World Bank and GIZ [Germany’s foreign aid agency] first need to acknowledge that the project is far from a replicable model, and nowhere near a success story by any standards,” the report said.

In 2008, Germany and the World Bank put up a combined $12.7 million—most of it came from the Bank—to find 10,000 hectares across the country to give to more than 3,000 poor families with little or no land. With the Land Management Ministry’s help, they eventually secured eight social land concessions in three provinces: Kompong Cham, Kompong Thom and Kratie.

In its last review of the project, in December, three months before it ended, the World Bank gave itself solid marks across the board. It said all four of its main goals had been met. The 3,000-plus families had all been assigned land for homes, farms, or both, and nearly 60 percent of them had moved in. Of the families who had moved in, the Bank said all of them had started farming and that their incomes had, on average, more than quadrupled.

“The activities and accomplishments have provided good lessons learned for the identification, development and sustainability of future [social land concession] sites,” the Bank said at the time.

But Licadho, which visited all eight concessions between October and March, says the reality for many of the families at all but one of the sites is not so rosy. It says many of the families complained of land that was too sandy or rocky to farm, or covered in forest they lacked the tools to clear, plots mired in land disputes, and sites missing promised infrastructure, schools or clinics.

“Numerous villagers at seven of the eight sites reported limited ability to use the allocated agricultural plots and hence gained no significant improvement in terms of food security,” it said. “As a result, poverty reduction was not achieved at the end of the project for the majority of the land recipients.”

According to the report, the government knew that at least two of the chosen sites were mostly covered with “poor” soil as early as 2006—two years before the project even began—thanks to a joint study by international consultants and local officials.

Licadho says some families have been forced to take on new debt to get by, find work as day laborers because their new farms were failing, or turn to logging.

As a consequence, the rights group says, some families have given up on the concessions and left. Based on its visits, it estimates that fewer than half of the families assigned plots were occupying them, well below the nearly 60 percent previously claimed by the World Bank.

One of the main goals of the LASED project is to give the families a piece of land they can own. But Licadho says the scheme is failing on that front, too.

By law, a family must occupy a plot on a social land concession for five consecutive years to qualify for a land title. But families that have been living on the sites for up to six are still waiting. Families that gave up and left, or intend to because their plots are of poor quality, may never receive a title.

Some families have struggled to use their plots because they are claimed by someone else.

“With the low settlement rates and limited use of agricultural land observed by Licadho…many land recipients risk failing to meet these conditions due to poor implementation of the project,” Licadho said. “Tenure security is by no means guaranteed for a sizeable part of the more than 3,000 land recipients.”

Officials at the Ministry of Land Management could not be reached yesterday. Neither the World Bank nor GIZ responded a request for comment.

Due to its shortfalls, Licadho said, the project “has failed to achieve the levels of success required to be considered a replicable model to reduce poverty and increase food security for rural landless and poor Cambodians.”

But that is exactly what is happening.

In a 2014 report on the project, Germany said the Cambodian government was already replicating the approach in six provinces.

The World Bank is also preparing a second, $27-million phase to the project that would improve the eight sites already established and add seven more.

To get started, though, the Bank will have to lift its moratorium on new lending to Cambodia, a proposal mired in its own controversy.

The World Bank imposed the lending freeze in 2011 in protest over the way the Land Management Ministry—the Bank’s future partner in any second phase of the LASED project—was doling out land titles. Some 3,000 families were forced out of their homes in Phnom Penh’s Boeng Kak neighborhood because the ministry refused to let them apply for titles.

The Bank said it would not lift its lending freeze until the Boeng Kak dispute was settled, a condition the government appears unwilling to meet.

PHNOM PENH—Phnom Penh Municipal Court again delayed a hearing for 11 opposition activists, shortly after opening one on Monday.

This is the fourth time the court has postponed a hearing for the Cambodia National Rescue Party activists, who include US citizen Meach Sovannara. All of them are accused of “insurrection,” following a demonstration that turned violent in July 2014 and led to the injuries of security personnel hired by Phnom Penh.

The activists have been released on bail, following the conclusion of political negotiations between the Rescue Party and the Cambodian People’s Party, over electoral reforms.

But the case still hangs over them, along with charges that Human Rights Watch has called “ridiculous.”

But a new Human Rights Watch report reveals that conditions at the poor nation’s garment factories aren’t merely bad. They’re often criminally abusive.

Americans have reason to cringe over the sad conditions forced on Cambodian clothing makers. The United States is the top destination for “Made in Cambodia” clothes. Major brands such as Gap, Marks & Spencer and Adidas all rely on Cambodians to stitch their clothing.

Outlets such as H&M can sell hoodies for as little as $25 because Cambodian women (almost all the workers are women) will sew for roughly 50 cents per hour.

Cambodia’s clothing factories are notoriously unpleasant. They’re hot and loud. Workers routinely flop on the floor in mass fainting episodes. Last year, strikes for better pay were crushed by authorities who shot dozens

And yet half a million Cambodians work in this sector — namely because the main alternative, toiling in rice paddies, can be even worse.

The Human Rights Watch report, “Work Faster or Get Out,” undermines major clothing conglomerates’ claims that factory abuses in Cambodia are isolated and easily fixed.

Interviews with workers in more than 70 factories add to the growing pile of evidence that suggests severe abuse is rampant — not rare — in Cambodian factories that stitch clothes for the West’s many mallrats. Here are four damning facts:

Factories hire children

Kids under 15 are legally forbidden to work in Cambodian factories. But some workers told Human Rights Watch that they dropped out of the seventh or eighth grade — at ages ranging from 12 to 14 — so they could start stitching for international brands.

According to the report, one woman at a factory supplying H&M clothes “estimated that 20 of the 60 workers were children.” Others told Human Rights Watch that “children worked as hard as adults” and would stitch long hours into the night.

Factories fire women who are visibly pregnant

Roughly 90 percent of Cambodia’s seamstresses are women. And if they get pregnant, they’re often fired.

Pregnant workers are seen as slow, unproductive, and prone to frequent bathroom breaks. At nearly half of the 70 factories investigated in the report, workers reported discrimination against pregnant workers.

As one former garment worker said, women will “wear their skirts or clothes really tight and try to squeeze their belly in so they can hide their pregnancy.” One factory accused by workers of discriminating against pregnant women has supplied clothes to Gap, according to Human Rights Watch.

Factories scream at you for using the toilet

Using the toilet during a 10-hour shift — even once or twice — can provoke the wrath of bosses. One factory cited in the report apparently makes threatening announcements over loudspeakers like, “Don’t go to the toilet … you need to sew faster.”

Factories scam workers out of cash

Some factories will promise extra cash to workers who churn out an exceptional number of blouses and T-shirts. The workers will clamor to hit this quota — all in the hopes of earning an extra 50 to 75 cents at the day’s end.

And then, according to Human Rights Watch, some factories will simply refuse to pay them. These quotas can also be extremely high: 2,000 shirts stitched in a 10-hour day. But when workers can’t stitch fast enough, they’re often told to go home so they can be replaced.

The most extreme abuses are carried out in shadowy off-the-books factories that secretly operate under legit factories with proper licenses. “The rights violations are the worst in these factories,” said Aruna Kashyap, the report’s lead author, “and we don’t even know how many of them exist.”

Driving down a busy Phnom Penh road, I notice a motorbike coming up behind us with a huge cage on its back. It’s so big I can barely see the driver.

As it whizzes past I notice the cage is squashed full of chickens, their flattened heads and claws poking out the sides.

There are no rules on Cambodia’s roads and you never know who’ll pull in front next. Or when.

The next car to pass is a black Porsche; its shiny body close to the ground as it hums past and weaves around the squashed chickens before evaporating into the distance.

Sights like this are common in Phnom Penh, where symbols of wealth and prosperity sit alongside extreme poverty and desperation.

It’s my first visit to Cambodia and I’m hoping to learn as much as I can about how the country has rebuilt itself in the aftermath of the violent Khmer Rouge regime and whether it’s capable of supporting refugees from Nauru, as planned by the Australian government.

The Khmer Rouge was a brutal regime that controlled Cambodia in the late 1970s, responsible for killing more than one million people.

In the aftermath of the regime a lot of children were left without parents and today more than half of Cambodia’s population is under 35. You don’t see very many elderly people around.

In the capital, tourists can go and visit the Killing Fields – where mass killings took place during the regime and graves were filled with bodies – to learn more about what went on.

When I visit the site, I notice a tree that has been fitted with a sign that says babies were killed during the regime by being smashed against it and tossed into graves. Another sign in front of a large tree says that speakers had been hung from its branches and music blasted to drown out victims’ screams.

Staring at the ground, I notice a human bone poking out from the dirt. When it rains apparently more can be seen, and teeth too. A sign warns visitors not to step on the bones.

I am later told that many young Cambodians grew up knowing little about the regime and that a law had been passed in 2009 that meant the history of the Khmer Rouge had to be taught in high schools.

A friend I’m travelling with tells me that she can’t believe how much Cambodia has developed since she was last there in 2007 and according to the Cambodian National Institute of Statistics (NIS) the poverty rate has dropped significantly since 2007. Despite this impressive score card, the gap between the rich and poor is still vast and many people still have limited access to basic necessities like food, electricity and working rubbish systems. And you don’t have to look far to see it

We visit a small lakeside village on the outskirts of Phnom Penh where there are small houses sitting on stilts above the ground. Underneath the houses lies a large, soupy lake: a mixture of sewage, rubbish and water. A flattened cigarette packet on the ground reads “Fine”.

Across town is a huge government building called the Council of Ministers’ Headquarters. Its modern exterior shines brightly in the mid-afternoon sun, exuding prosperity and wealth.

Just next to it is another government building with a huge pyramid-like structure at its centre. I am told this building was paid for by China.

The buildings looks out over a wide valley called the Boeung Kak lake. There is no water in the lake because it was filled with sand five years ago to make way for development. Today it looks dusty and depressing.

A Cambodian man named Phearak who is travelling with us tells me that he used to go to the lake with his parents as a little boy.

He now lives in Australia so it’s the first time he’s seen it since the lake’s been filled.

“To come here now, it’s very sad,” he says.

The Cambodian government is big on development and has grand plans be a middle-income country by 2030. Cambodia’s burgeoning middle class has also brought with it a new attraction to owning shiny objects and an obsession with social status.

“People are very materialistic here,” Phearak says. “You can see lots of people have fancy mobile phones. It’s about status; about fitting in.”

We travel out of Phnom Penh for a few days and on the way we stop at a temple with more than 300 steps to the top.

There are a whole lot of Cambodian children hanging around the bottom of the steps holding fans. They follow us as we walk up, fanning us until we tell them to stop.

At the top, sweaty tourists sit mopping their brows and gazing happily out over majestic views that seem to stretch into infinity.

Weaving among them are the loyal fanners who seem undeterred by the tourists’ reluctance to cough up any money.

Through an interpreter I ask one of them what she is doing up there. She tells me she has school in the morning but comes to the temple in the afternoon to make money. She asks us what we’re doing and we tell her we’re on our way to another town.

She tells us to be careful and says that it could be risky. There is a chance that we could have our stomachs cut open and our kidneys stolen. I wonder where she got that idea from

Back on the road, I can’t stop thinking about that little girl and what kind of life she’ll lead. We’ll be heading back in Phnom Penh in a few days. It seems like a place where poverty is common and people can easily fall through the cracks. But it’s also the most prosperous city in Cambodia and has a large number of schools and universities.

Incensed by the prime minister’s assertion last week that the “same faces” always show up at protests, a group of Phnom Penh’s most prominent anti-eviction activists picketed City Hall on Monday to vent their anger.

At the opening of the Sokha Phnom Penh Hotel on March 23, Mr. Hun Sen took aim at the active protest movement in the city, and the NGOs he claims are behind it, saying that “Cambodia has become a paradise for inciting demonstrations, and the demonstrators have the same faces again and again.”

Former Boeng Kak residents submit a petition at the World Bank’s office in Phnom Penh on Monday. (Satoshi Takahashi)

On Monday, as about 50 members of the displaced Boeng Kak community petitioned the World Bank and the U.S. and E.U. embassies, asking for their intervention, another 30 activists who regularly front land-rights protests played perfectly to the prime minister’s narrative.

“We came here to rebuke the accusations of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who accused us of being the same faces coming to protest again and again,” Bov Sorphea said.

Ms. Sorphea has come to the fore of recent demonstrations in the absence of Tep Vanny, who was jailed along with six others for obstructing traffic after placing a bed on the road outside City Hall in November to protest severe flooding of the Boeng Kak neighborhood.

Ms. Sorphea reasoned that the same faces were present at protests because the prime minister had failed to solve the city’s many land disputes and address, in particular, the long-running grievances of the Boeng Kak and Borei Keila communities.

“It’s like someone is drowning, but you do not help the person who is drowning, you take a paddle and hit them on the head,” she said.

A senior refugee department official has said that ethnic Jarai Montagnards fleeing alleged persecution in neighbouring Vietnam need to enter Cambodia via official checkpoints in order to register as asylum seekers on arrival.

General Sok Phal, director general of the General Department of Immigration, made the comments after meeting with British Ambassador Bill Longhurst, who travelled to Ratanakkiri province to meet with a local human rights group last week.

“Illegal immigrants do not cross through international checkpoints, but through illegal checkpoints,” Phal said, adding that his department only monitors the 13 official land crossings and any would-be asylum seekers wishing to enter Cambodia would have to make it to the nearest immigration office to have a chance of registering.

Police deported 45 Montagnard asylum seekers last month, and since then, four of the deportees have reportedly “disappeared” from their village.

Another 13 were officially recognised as refugees by the Ministry of Interior yesterday. At least another 23 are thought to be in Cambodia and seeking asylum.

Phal said 10 asylum seekers in the capital had filed their claims, which are under review.

Like this:

Thirty-two families in Kampong Chhnang’s Teuk Phos district filed a complaint to rights group Adhoc yesterday, reporting they had been pressured by local authorities to sell their land for just $150 per hectare.

The land is being accumulated by a man seeking to develop it as a cassava plantation who has bought over 1,000 hectares.

“I want to keep the land to farm and support my family in the future,” said 40-year-old resident Chan San. He said the local authorities told him that if he didn’t agree to move, they would force him to.

“Compared with the market price, it is so cheap – it’s like giving it away for free,” said Adhoc coordinator Sam Chankea. He said that 400 families in the area had already agreed to sell. In 2014, the government provided families three hectares of land each in Kraing Skear commune, but now most of them have decided to relinquish their property for a small profit, he added.

Chhoub Phoen, an assistant to the Kraing Skear commune chief, said that none of the sales had been forced, and most “agreed because they think don’t have ability to develop the land”.

Chan Kean, a representative for the developer, also stated that acquisitions were not forced.

This morning, around 100 people from three different communities including SOS community, Boeung Kak Lake and Borei Keila community rallied together and marched to Hun Sen’s house in order to seek for his intervention on the new installment of electricity over their households.
See photos in actions as below:

Villagers in Banteay Meanchey province on Saturday protested against a local military official’s plan to build a reservoir on their land, then sell the dirt at a profit.

The reservoir is being dug over 52 hectares in Serei Saophoan City’s Kompong Svay commune by Brigadier General Plon Dara, commander of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces in Banteay Meanchey.

Villagers gather on Saturday near an excavator beginning to dig a 52-hectare reservoir that will engulf their rice fields in Banteay Meanchey province’s Serei Saophoan City. (Adhoc)

According to villager Nem Chhun, 39, 120 people from 85 families who stand to lose their rice fields to the reservoir demonstrated outside the provincial government hall on Saturday after excavators moved in and began digging.

“We protested, demanding that the governor help us, because Mr. Plon Dara is digging up the rice fields and taking the earth for sale,” Ms. Chhun said Sunday, adding that she would lose a 2,500-square-meter plot of land if the digging continued.

“We will burn the excavators if they come back to dig up our rice fields,” she said.

Brigadier General Dara argued that the digging was lawful because his son, Plon Hong, received permission from the Ministry of Water Resources and the provincial government in 2008 to build a reservoir there for irrigation purposes.

“Provincial authorities allowed my family’s company to build the irrigation [reservoir],” he said. “The agreement stated that the company will take the earth from the rice fields and the state will get a water reservoir for irrigation.”

Ms. Chhun, however, said the planned reservoir would be of little use to the protesting villagers if they had no crops.

“We don’t need an irrigation system, because we will have lost all the land here. So how can we cultivate rice with that irrigation?” she said.

She also said the company had not shown residents a plan for the proposed reservoir, and that villagers believed the company was only seeking to excavate and sell the earth.

Provincial administration chief Chhoeun Krayong said the digging had been temporarily halted while local officials discuss the villagers’ demands.

They are asking the government to make the general’s company stop digging the reservoir and replace the earth that had been excavated so far, and are also seeking titles to their farmland, Mr. Krayong said.

“I told the [villager] representatives that we will find a solution for those families for the [first] two requests only, but we are not able to issue land titles for those families because this is state land,” he said.

Government security guards and riot police Thursday blocked about 50 demonstrators from marching to Phnom Penh’s Freedom Park to protest for the release of 19 imprisoned anti-eviction activists, monks and opposition CNRP figures.

The protesters, which included members of the city’s embattled Boeng Kak and Borei Keila communities, planned to rally at Freedom Park before delivering a petition to the National Assembly, and gathered outside the US Embassy at about 9:45 am before marching to the park.

A protester holds up a sign calling for the release of 19 jailed activists outside the National Assembly on Thursday. (Siv Channa / The Cambodia Daily)

But they were stopped at nearby Wat Phnom by a roughly equal number of Daun Penh district security guards and riot police.

“We will not allow you to march, as City Hall has not given you permission,” district security chief Kim Vutha told the group, adding that they would have to ride tuk-tuks to the National Assembly.

The demonstrators agreed, and successfully delivered their petition to both the National Assembly and Royal Palace before returning home.

City Hall spokesman Long Dimanche said any future attempts by the group to protest would be prevented.